A Google bomb
or Google wash is an attempt to influence the ranking of
a given site in results returned by the
Google
search engine. Due to the way that Google's
PageRank
algorithm works, a
website will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that
page all use consistent anchor text. Googlebomb is used
both as a verb
and a
noun.

For example, if
a user registers many
domains and all of them link to a main site with the text "...
is a living legend" then searching for "living legend" on
Google will return the main site higher in the ranking, even if
the phrase "living legend" doesn't appear on the main site. A
common means of exploiting this is through
weblogs, where although the entry may disappear from the
main page quickly, the short-term effects of a link can
dramatically affect the ranking of a given site. Empirical
results indicate that it does not take a large number of
websites to achieve a Googlebomb. The effect has been achieved
with only a handful of dedicated weblogs.

The technique
was first discussed on
April 6,
2001
in an article by
Adam Mathes. In that article, he coined the term "Google
bombing" and explained how he discovered that Google used the
technique to calculate page rankings. He found that a search for
"internet rockstar" returned the website of
Ben Brown as the first result, even though "internet
rockstar" did not appear anywhere on Brown's webpage. He
reasoned that Google's algorithm returned it as the first result
because many fan sites that linked to Brown's website used that
phrase on their own pages.

Mathes began
testing his theory by setting out to make the website of his
friend Andy Pressman the number one result for a query of "talentless
hack". He gave instructions for creating websites and links to
Pressman's website with the text of the link reading "talentless
hack". Sure enough, as other webloggers joined in his
Googlebombing campaign, Pressman's website became the number one
result in a Google search for "talentless hack". (Ironically, by
2004, Mathes's own site was the number one Google result of this
search term.)

However, the
first Google bomb mentioned in the popular press may have
occurred accidentally in 1999,
when users discovered that the query "more
evil than Satan (http://www.google.com/search?q=more+evil+than+Satan)"
returned
Microsoft's home page. Now, it returns links to several news
articles on the discovery.

Ironically,
Google bombs often end their life by being too popular or well
known, thereby attaining a mention in well regarded web journals
and knocking the bomb off the top spot. It is sometimes
commented that Google bombing need not be countered because of
this self-disassembly.

Accomplished
Googlebombs

Recent (as
of 2004) and popular examples are:

Ladrones (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ladrones&btnG=Google+Search)
(Spanish for "thieves") points to the homepage of SGAE, (Sociedad
General de Autores y Editores), the Spanish equivalent of
the
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The
SGAE is an extremely unpopular association in Spain since
they not only try to prosecute users of P2P
applications, but also impose surcharges on the price of
physical media such as recordable CDs in order to account
for the theoretical losses due to P2P exchanges.

Weapons of mass destruction (http://www.google.com/search?q=weapons+of+mass+destruction&btnI)
- Internet Explorer Error look-alike joke page saying "weapons
of mass destruction cannot be found". (Note: as of 1
December 2004, the joke page, although still available at
[1] (http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/),
had fallen to 20th place in the Google search result.)

Similarly,
Armas de destrucción masiva (http://www.google.com/search?q=armas+de+destrucci%C3%B3n+masiva&btnI),
Spanish for "Weapons of mass destruction", gives a
Spanish version of the page above.

French military victories (http://www.google.com/search?q=french+military+victories&btnI)
- hoax, Google look-a-like page saying "no results found for
French military victories, did you mean French military
defeats?"

miserable failure (http://www.google.com/search?q=miserable+failure&btnI),
worst president (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=worst+president&btnI)
and
great president (http://www.google.com/search?q=great+president&btnI)
- whitehouse.gov biography of
George W. Bush. Due to the search query of "miserable
failure," the search terms
miserable (http://www.google.com/search?q=miserable&btnI)
and
failure (http://www.google.com/search?q=failure&btnI)
also point to the biography of
George W. Bush. Recently, they've added
unelectable (http://www.google.com/search?q=unelectable&btnI)
to point to the biography on the White House's homepage.
Interestingly enough,
www.unelectable.com also points to the same page (despite
Bush's win for his second campaign bid), and is second in
Google's Search for "unelectable." See also
miserable failure. With the addition of
Google Local (http://local.google.com/local?sc=1&hl=en&q=miserable+failure&near=washington+dc&btnG=Google+Search&rl=1)
and Maps, searching for the phrase in Washington DC provides
George W. Bush as the first result.

Jew (http://www.google.com/search?q=jew&btnI)
-
JewWatch, an anti-Semitic group, was for a long time the
number one hit when searching on Google for "Jew",
perhaps because of its linking pattern. The Wikipedia entry
replaced it following a Googlebombing campaign organized by
Daniel Sieradski, editor of the blog
Jew School (http://www.jewschool.com).
[2] (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4767133/)
[3] (http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1082606042155)
[4] (http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-45-20040416GooglebombingOfJewKeywordContinues.html)
Google added an explanation page entitled
Offensive Search Results (http://www.google.com/explanation.html)
and placed it in the sponsored link section.

Santorum (http://www.google.com/search?q=santorum&btnI)
- "Spreading Santorum," a campaign to ridicule
Senator Santorum by naming a mixture of bodily
substances after him (see
Santorum controversy).

Out of Touch Executives (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22out+of+touch+executives%22&btnI)
- Used to lead to Google's own corporate information page.
Out of Touch Management (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22out+of+touch+management%22&btnI)
used to work as well.

Raar Kapsel (http://www.google.com/search?q=raar+kapsel&btnI)
("Weird Haircut" in
Dutch) - Returns the biography of the Prime Minister of
the Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende, who is known for his
distinctive hairstyle.

Gladjakker (http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=gladjakker&btnG=Google+zoeken&lr=)
("smoothie") returns website of
Camiel Eurlings, the leader of the
Dutch Christian-Democrat faction in the
European Parliament.

Searching
UK domains only (http://www.google.co.uk)
for
poodle (http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=poodle&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB&btnI)
gives you a link to a
Tony Blair biography (http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/page4.asp).

Ignorant Asshole (http://www.google.com/search?q=ignorant+asshole)
returns the website of Cal Thomas. The reason was his
column (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,140612,00.html).

Déspota Cachaceiro (http://www.google.com.br/search?hl=pt-BR&q=D%C3%A9spota+Cachaceiro&btnG=Pesquisar&meta=)
return to website of
Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, about the polemic
New York Times
article (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30E16FB3E580C7A8CDDAC0894DC404482).

Old Rice And Monkey Nuts (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=old+rice+and+monkey+nuts)
returns the website of
Herald Sun columnist
Andrew Bolt. The phrase is an obscure reference to
Tirath Khemlani, a Pakistani commodities trader who was
involved in brokering an improbable US$4 billion loan deal
to the Australian Government under Prime Minister
Gough Whitlam in
1974. Khemlani was known derisively by his usual line of
trade -
rice and
monkey nuts. As he was involved in commodities and not
financial transactions as a rule, it was believed that
Khemlani did not have access to the funds as he claimed but
would attempt to obligate the Australian Government of the
day to pay a huge commission for arranging the proposed
loan. The bomb was perpetrated at the suggestion of
Ausculture (http://www.ausculture.com)
for reasons unknown.

lying sack of shit (http://www.google.com/search?&q=lying+sack+of+shit)
returns the Parliamentary web page of Australian Federal
Attorney General
Phillip Ruddock. This bomb was suggested by
weezil (http://weezil0.blogspot.com)
and executed by a number of Australian bloggers in protest
of Ruddock's protracted political smear of the now
exonerated
Mamdouh Habib

fuckwit (http://www.google.com/search?&q=fuckwit)
returns John Prescott who is the Deputy leader of the Labour
party government in the UK. He is the only member of the
cabinet to come from humble begininings (he was a shop
steward so rose to the top through the trade union movement)
so is famed for being a bear of very little brain, hence the
link.

swivel eyed loons (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=swivel+eyed+loons)
returns the homepage of the UK
Independence Party after the phrase - initially used to
describe the party by blogger Anthony Wells - was adopted by
several British bloggers.

Googlebombing
competitions

In
May 2004,
Dark Blue (http://www.darkblue.com)
and
SearchGuild.com (http://www.searchguild.com)
teamed up to create what they termed the "SEO Challenge". They
offered an
Apple iPod
to the person whose page was the first result for the search
phrase "nigritude
ultramarine" one month after the competition's start, 9 a.m.
on
June 7. This winner was known as the "Player". A Sony
flat-screen monitor was the prize for being the first result at
9 a.m.
July 7. This winner was known as the "Stayer".

The Player's
Prize was won by Merkey (forums.merkey.net), a forum that used a
combination of googlebombing and
keyword spamming. The Stayer's Prize was won by
anildash (http://www.dashes.com/anil),
a weblog that won through blog-based googlebombing.

The contest
sparked controversy around the Internet, as some groups worried
that
search engine optimization (SEO) companies would abuse the
techniques used in the competition to alter queries more
relevant to the average user. This fear was offset by the belief
of others that
Google would alter their algorithm based on the methods used
by the googlebombers.

Google's
response

Google has
defended its algorithms as simply a reflection of the opinion on
the Web, saying that it is not damaging the overall quality of
its services. Google has said it expects Googlebombing to return
to obscurity and has dismissed it as "cybergraffiti" and just
another internet fad.

On
18 January 2005
the
Google blog (http://www.google.com/googleblog/)
entry "Preventing comment spam" declared that Google will
henceforth respect a rel="nofollow"
attribute on hyperlinks. Their page ranking algorithm now avoids
links with this attribute when ranking the destination page. The
intended result is that site administrators can modify
user-posted links such that the attribute is present, and thus
an attempt to googlebomb by posting a link on such a site would
yield no increase from that link.

Googlebombing
in general

In some cases,
the phenomenon has produced competing attempts to use the same
search term as a Googlebomb. As a result, the first result at
any given time varies, but the targeted sites will occupy all
the top slots using a normal search instead of "I'm feeling
lucky". Notable instances of this include
failure (http://www.google.com/search?q=failure)
and
miserable failure (http://www.google.com/search?q=miserable+failure).
The primary targets have been the Bush biography above (as well
as another biography of
Jimmy Carter on the same site),
Michael Moore's website at www.michaelmoore.com, and the
Senate website of
Hillary Clinton.

Searching for
miserabile fallimento (http://www.google.com/search?q=miserabile+fallimento)
(Italian for "miserable failure") was returning
Berlusconi biography (http://www.palazzochigi.it/Presidente/Biografia/biografiait.html),
until the webmaster inserted the HTML
tag that prevents the page from being indexed by Google (<meta
name="googlebot" content="noindex, nofollow" />).

It is
interesting to note that because of the popularity of Google,
other search engines such as
Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com),
AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com),
and
HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com)
are also affected by Google Bombs. A search of "miserable
failure" on the forementioned search engines produce the
biography of
George W. Bush listed at the White House site as the first
link on the list. Only a few search engines, such as
Ask Jeeves! (http://www.ask.com),
MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com)
and
ProFusion (http://www.profusion.com),
do not produce the same first links as the rest of the search
engines. MetaCrawler and ProFusion are
metasearch engines which use multiple search engines... this
might explain why they do not produce the biography of
George W. Bush listed at the White House site as the first
link on the list when searching for "miserable failure."

Commercial
googlebombing

Some
unscrupulous website operators have adapted googlebombing
techniques to
spamdexing.

One such
technique is the posting of links to a site in an
Internet forum along with phrases the promoter hopes to
associate with the site. Unlike conventional message board spam,
the object is not to attract readers to the site directly, but
to increase the site's ranking under those search terms.
Promoters using this technique frequently target forums with low
reader traffic, in hopes that it will fly under the moderators'
radar.
Wikis in particular are often the target of this kind of
page rank vandalism, as all of the pages are freely editable.

Another
technique is for the owner of an Internet
domain name to set up the domain's DNS
entry so that all
subdomains are directed to the same server. The operator
then sets up the server so that page requests generate a page
full of desired Google search terms, each linking to a subdomain
of the same site, with the same title as the subdomain in the
requested
URL. Frequently the subdomain matches the linked phrase,
with spaces replaced by
underscores or
hyphens. Since Google treats subdomains as distinct sites,
the effect of a large number of subdomains linking to each other
is a boost to the PageRank of those subdomains and of any other
site they link to.

As of 2 February
2005, many have noticed changes in the Google algorithm that
largely affects, among other things, Googlebombs. As evidence of
this, ponder that only roughly 10% of the googlebombs listed
above work as of 15 February 2005. This is largely due to Google
refactoring its valuation of PageRank, mostly in an effort to
keep up with the encroaching result relevancy of the Yahoo and
MSN search engines, which many people claim are not nearly as
easy to "hack" as Google.

The Amway
Quixtar Google Bombing Example

One might think
that Google Bombing is only a sport of pranksters, hackers, and
small time site owners attempting to outsmart their competition.
But there are cases of billion dollar companies shamelessly
attempting this ill-guided strategy.

Leaders within
Amway Quixtar boasted stage front to their faithful members that
they had hired geekoids who were spending their time Google
bombing positive info about Quixtar so that the negative sites
would be buried way down at the bottom of the Google list when a
prospect types in
Quixtar (http://www.google.com/search?q=quixtar&hl=en&lr=&sa=N&tab=iw)
Nobody will even be able to find the negative sites anymore.
SOURCE:
Quixtar Admits Google Bombing (http://www.webraw.com/quixtar/archives/2004/11/quixtar_admits_google_bombing.php)

The goal in this
case was to smother anti-Amway, anti-Quixtar sites,
consumer protection groups (http://www.pyramidschemealert.org/PSAMain/home.html),
eBooks about Amway and Quixtar (http://www.merchantsofdeception.com),
Amway Quixtar story blogs (http://www.letsgetthewordout.com/amway-quixtar-blog/lets_get_the_word_out/),
and
grassroots movements from ex-Amway or ex-Quixtar members (http://www.letsgetthewordout.com/)
that claim Amway or Quixtar is a
Pyramid scheme,
cult,
or uses deceptive business practices.

Quixtar's
attempt to drown those pesky negative information web sites in a
sea of worthless and repetitive hits backfired and
Google officially spanked Quixtar (http://www.amquix.info/quixtar_spanked.html)
for its attempt to "Google bomb" the Internet's most popular
search engine.

A search on
Google for "Quixtar (http://www.google.com/search?q=quixtar&hl=en&lr=&sa=N&tab=iw)
" will reveal that the Quixtar.com site which formerly always
held the number one search position dropped to the middle of the
third page of search results.

The organized
effort to manipulate search engine results was first brought to
light by bloggers which detailed the offenses in an article
"So Busted" (http://www.webraw.com/quixtar/archives/2005/01/so_busted.php).

Ironically the
site that reported Quixtar's attempt to Google bomb now occupies
the first search position under "Quixtar". In fact the first
five hits for the term "Quixtar" are all information sites
critical of the Quixtar business opportunity and their lines of
sponsorship. The lesson of this failed coup is that unless you
enjoy working your public relations department overtime and seek
to reduce your bottom-line profits, don't Google bomb.

Quixtar's
initiative to
spam
the internet included at least
54 Quixtar Blogs (http://www.amquix.info/quixtar_spanked.html)
and numerous other
bogus news sites or controlled news outlets (http://www.webraw.com/quixtar/archives/2004/10/the_quixtar_web_initiative.php),
character assassination blogs,
adoration blogs, and various other pages in their multi
pronged assault. Immediately after the exposure many of the
blogs shut down or reduced their content.

Amway Quixtar
also has independent
lines of sponsorship which some happen to be the largest
abusers of Google bombing. These "lines" are lead by Independent
Business Owner often called IBOs, Quixtar Diamonds, Amway Crowns
or
kingpins such as
Bill Britt (http://www.technorati.com/tag/Bill%20Britt)
of
Britt Worldwide (http://www.bww.com),
Dexter Yager (http://www.technorati.com/tag/Dexter%20Yager),
Fred
Harteis (http://www.technorati.com/tag/Harteis),
Orrin Woodward of Team (Team
of Destiny (http://www.amquix.info/team_google_bombing.html))
and other Diamond IBOs.

These type
business practices cost Google money and because they skew
search engine results, they affect everyone. If you observe or
suspect a company is involved in such bad business practices you
can take action in many ways. Write the offending company or
individual, get involved in
groups that oppose deceptive business practices (http://www.letsgetthewordout.com),
contact
Your State Attorney General (http://www.letsgetthewordout.com/lawyers_lawsuit/attorney_generals.html),
the better business bureau and/or blog your discoveries and
observations.

!!!
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means
that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions)
remains under this license. See
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html for details. It uses material from the
Wikipedia article Google
Bombing!!!

Google
Bombing, The Word Spy:
"Setting up a large number of Web pages with links that point to a specific
Web site so that the site will appear near the top of a Google search when users
enter the link text."

John Kerry has been
Google-Bombed with the word 'waffles'. His candidate's campaign website appears
at the top of the result list when the word "waffles"
is typed into Google. This was achieved by Ken Jacobson, a Duquesne
University Law School student, with the help of at least 44 other Web sites and
blogs. Kerry's campaign is trying to capitalize on the prank by purchasing
Google AdWords, sponsored links that come up beside results when people search
for "waffles".